BUFFALO, N.Y. — Although famously and at various times
ruined, rich, poor, cold, Midwestern and Eastern, industrial and no
longer so, the fact is that Buffalo, New York, is a city that
thoroughly engages its historians, artists, writers, activists,
architectural essayists, urban anthropologists and cultural
critics, not to mention poets, runners and wing gobblers.

The city is the subject of a new and distinctive exploration,
“Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo” (Ashgate Publishing
Ltd., Surrey, 2014), edited by art historian Miriam Paeslack,
assistant professor in the Arts Management Program at the
University at Buffalo.

It is a collection of critical essays and rich imagery by
scholars, artists and community members, some of whom were
participants in the 2011 “Ineffably Urban” symposium
organized by Paeslack for UB and held at Hallwalls Contemporary
Arts Center.

The book’s public launch at 7 p.m. May 1 at Hallwalls, 341
Delaware Ave., Buffalo, will feature talks and book signings by the
contributors, who will offer the audience a smorgasbord of
intriguing and unexpected ways in which they addressed the Nickel
City.

It is an event that will be of interest to Buffalo history
buffs, photo lovers, non-academics and academics of many
stripes.

The goal of the book, as was that of the symposium, is the
exploration of the conflicting imagery, identities and many
narratives of Buffalo and similarly situated cities that have
emerged through art in recent years: stories told by garbage, old
industrial giants, urban farming, even abandoned shopping
carts.

Because Buffalo’s urbanity is “ineffable”
— too complex to be expressed or described in words —
the authors explore how it appears in images found in photographs,
maps, advertisements and other visual media that reveal the
city’s peripheral spaces, rubble, neighborhoods, activism,
“new pastoralism,” refugee urbanism and even
pyromania.

Mary N. Woods, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architecture at
Cornell University, says the book “challenges and complicates
the usual imagery and discourse surrounding today’s shrinking
cities … excavating the many lives and places nested within
the city’s past and present.”

The book features a forward by Andreas Huyssen of Columbia
University, author of “Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a
Culture of Amnesia” and a scholar of theories of
representation and difference. It ends with an afterward by
well-known Buffalo urban activist, author, entrepreneur and local
historian Mark Goldman.

Contributors include culture and urbanism writer Jeff Byles,
whose work unearths, among other things, the history of demolition
and the “unbuilding” of our cities; prominent local
artist Julian Montague, whose “Stray Shopping Cart
Identification System” provides a language with which to
engage in meaningful discussion of these often-homeless and
terribly familiar critters; photographer Gregory Halpern, whose
photos, he says, are “from the American Rust Belt without
being about it,” and American historian and photographer
Peter Bacon Hales, who considers representations of Buffalo during
its monumental transformation from 1804 to 1929.

Well-known Buffalo activist and organizer Aaron Bartley,
co-founder of People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), who has
been cited by Bill Moyers among “Activists to Watch,”
discusses the challenge Buffalo faces in attempts to synthesize the
pastoralism of Frederick Law Olmsted’s system of parks and
parkways with the urban “wilds” emerging throughout the
city.

Work by a number of UB faculty members is included as well. One
is UB architect Dennis Maher, who offers an explication of his
house on Fargo Avenue in which he continues to deploy detritus from
urban ruins in the construction of his massive, complex and
endlessly explorable city-in-a-house.

Another is UB urban historian Michael Frisch, who with Paeslack
considers Milton Rogovin’s haunting, dignified photographic
series of Buffalo’s poor and working-class residents across
decades. Architectural historian, theorist and critic Hadas Steiner
discusses the historic imagery of the city’s famed and
industrially important grain elevators, which so influenced early
European modernity.

Dorothea Braemer of the UB Department of Media Study, a
passionate believer in the power of grass-roots documentary media,
developed the Channels program through which documentary filmmakers
partner with community groups and urban grass-roots initiatives.
Here, she considers three Buffalo-based documentaries produced by
Channels, including “You Are Where You Live” by the
Western New York Clean Air Coalition and a film made with Buffalo
Reuse, Western New York’s largest supplier of used building
materials.

Jordan Geiger, UB assistant professor of architecture, has a
deep interest in refugee urbanism and here considers the visual
languages of sensing, play and immigration policy in mapping the
urban refugee space.

Carl Lee of the UB Department of Media Study discusses his film
installation focused on Buffalo’s disappearing houses.

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